BTW, if I may speculate about why more women don't post to photo forum sites, one reason might be because a great many of the images of women posted to such sites portray them as skinny bimbos in frilly underwear--"Glamour" and "Boudoir" photography being blatant examples. If a woman isn't traditionally beautiful, if she is over thirty and/or a few pounds overweight, she is not regarded as a suitable subject for this type of soft-core porn. And the polite large-format nudes that pass as "art" are no better, skillfully concealing pubic and other body hair; moles, warts and other "flaws"; and denying women's bodily functions as though they were all something shameful.(posted 8813 days ago)What I wanted to do in this photo was to attack this kind of neo- pictorialist drivel head-on, with flat, revealing lighting and an 8x10 camera. (I apologize for the JPEG, which is a bit light on the right side. I assure you all that the gold-toned contact print is exquisite.)
BTW, the object between the woman's thighs is a rock, one which my wife found on the beach, and which contains a red mineral that reminded her of blood. The name of the photo, "Moonrock", refers to the woman's "moon time." The rock was bled on and, after the shoot, placed on the subject's altar, as a healing totem; the woman had some terrible issues regarding menstruation that had been imprinted on her by Church and society when she was growing up.
The photo is also a deliberate antitheis to the moon rocks of patriarchal "exploration"--the dead, lifeless rocks that NASA astronauts raped from the moon surface in the name of science--all while leaving piles of their space junk behind. A metaphor, I submit, for the way women (and nature) are raped and explored, er, exploited in our society.